The long-term objectives of this research center are to: (1) identify physiologic parameters which delineate speech production patterns; (2) use the parameters to characterize normal and abnormal speech articulation gestures; (3) isolate and differentiate features of misarticulation related to organic disorders such as hearing loss, neurologic impairment and oral anomaly; (4) observe alterations in articulatory physiology in response to standard auditory and special instrumental feedback routines; (5) devise clinical strategies to maximize effectiveness of articulation remediation procedures. A special instrumental system, called PAGIS, has been developed to measure simultaneously lip and jaw movements, linguapalatal contact and acoustic patterns of speech with little disturbance from the sensing devices. Research goals for the coming year are to: (1) continue refinement of the instrumental system, adding absolute sound level calibration and interfacing a color monitor for special feedback functions; (2) expand software capabilities to include determining duration of phonetic segments, processing gnathometer data in real time, and refining feature extraction programs; (3) investigate contrasting articulatory characteristics of normal and abnormal /s/, (4) isolate and differentiate physiologic features of misarticulation in speakers with "functional" lisp; and (5) initiate pilot studies of speech articulation by speakers with moderate to severe hearing losses. BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES: Wolf, M.B., McCutcheon, M.J., Hasegawa, A., and Fletcher, S.G. (1976) "Linguapalatal contacts during /s/ production," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 59:548. Wolf, M.B., Fletcher, S.G. and McCutcheon, M.J. (1976) "Measurement of lip-jaw motion and tongue contact in speech," 1976 Meeting of the American Association of Medical Instrumentation, Atlanta, Ga.